Cat in a Quicksilver Caper

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Temple swallowed, remembering that Matt had performed this very unpleasant service for his dead stepfather. How domestically bizarre and living-roomish it was to open the chintzy, short drapes just to see a draped gurney with only a dead head revealed.

  How weird to see a person lying down never to get up again. How bizarre to imagine that graveyard-pale, makeup-masked Shangri-La persona as still as death.

  “They washed off the makeup, of course,” Alch added.

  Who was “they”? Temple wondered, bracing herself. Barefaced. Temple recalled the taut, angry, raw features she’d glimpsed on the exhibition floor when she was too surprised to realize that it was Shangri-La until the woman had moved on.

  “How tall was she?” Temple asked.

  A rustle as Alch consulted his lined notebook. “Five four.”

  Temple nodded. Her impression exactly and height was always a prime issue with a shorty like herself. She knew where the top of her head hit on Max, for example, in heels and out of them, and now, on Matt. What a fickle girl! She deserved this moment of penance and repentance, only she didn’t believe in all that breast-beating stuff. Did she?

  You don’t gaze on a dead person everyday. In funeral parlors they’re tarted up for the afterlife. Here, it was the naked and the dead and no escaping that reality in the comforting rituals of church and state and custom.

  “Ready?” Alch didn’t sound ready himself.

  Temple nodded.

  The curtains hissed open on their rods like hula-dancing snakes. The sheet was so white it made the body’s skin tone look dingy, like yellow-gray laundry. In a way, Temple felt she was viewing a gray-and-white movie still. She saw mostly profile, but there was no denying the small, stubby nose, the large flat cheekbones, the jet black eyes. Nothing could return the taut muscular facial animation that had made all these features bold and vibrant and rather scary.

  “That’s her.”

  “Sure?” Alch’s forehead had creased like a raised miniblind, all furrows. Must be from working for Molina.

  Temple nodded. “The animation’s gone, of course, but the features were quite striking. Unforgettable. And, we were a similar height, I saw them close-up. Do you have any idea yet who she really was?”

  “We know exactly who she was.” Alch came to stand beside her. “Fingerprints. Ran them internationally.”

  “Internationally?”

  He shrugged. “Her Asian origin, the fact that the exhibition has a Russian connection. You never know what will turn up.”

  “And?” A minuscule part of Temple’s reptile brain, the sheer primitive instinct part, still wasn’t sure this wasn’t Kitty the Cutter with plastic surgery and a spirit-gum extreme makeover.

  “This little lady was on an international wanted list.”

  Kitty? My God. Maybe she’d had plastic surgery years ago when she was on the run from both Interpol and the IRA, like Max. He’d just popped in some green contact lenses and disappeared into a bold performing persona. Maybe Kitty had remade her face and created a veiled persona. But wait! Matt was the only one to see her face-to-face as Kathleen O’Connor, and she’d been a black Irish beauty then. How could she—?

  Alch was watching her wheels turn way too carefully.

  “What could a young Asian woman do to be wanted internationally?” Temple asked.

  “She defected fifteen years ago from a mainland Chinese company of acrobats touring in Spain. Was never seen since. Until now. Name of Hai Ling.”

  Temple would have gasped but she held her breath instead. That would explain Shangri-La’s on- and off-stage makeup disguise. She was a political defector using her acrobatic prowess in a new career, magician.

  That would not explain why this wanted woman who apparently had no love for Temple, sight unseen, had shown Temple her true face on the floor of the exhibition hall only two days before her death.

  Who, What, Why?

  Okay.

  The Synth was big, bad, and in this caper up to its vanishing cream in perfidy.

  Temple knew that. She also knew, somewhere deep in her foreshortened bones, that more was going on here at the New Millennium than Synth games.

  Andrei-Art had died first, during a possible attempt to steal the scepter.

  That meant that someone had torpedoed his scheme as artfully as Max’s. Not just anyone. If she believed in Max, at least as a wily super-criminal—and she did, until death or disinterest did them part—his role was the coda of this operation, not the prelude.

  Speaking in musical terms, could Olga Kirkov have used her disabled and disowned younger brother to fulfill a long-delayed lust for a priceless piece of her White Russian past?

  And what about Count Volpe, an urbane aristocratic gigolo living on the decadent Western cult of personality? He had consulted himself into the trivial notoriety of the Vogue and Vanity Fair party-photo pages, a grave that would ultimately be unmarked. Unless he recovered the Czar Alexander scepter for his family, his past, his legacy.

  Then there was Dimitri, the government functionary nobody much liked. And his big guard dogs too. Two. What couldn’t the three of them accomplish if up to no good . . . up to no Boris Godunov? Temple imagined that the New Russia was no more immune to the lure of Big Bucks than the old imperialist model.

  So. Who had planned what would have been a spectacular distraction? Up in the sky! Look! It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s super-destruction—!

  Had Max not been there on Synth business, the Cloaked Conjuror, Shangri-La, the two black panthers, and Hyacinth, the performing housecat, would have all plummeted to their deaths.

  In that chaos, with everybody present focusing on the carnage on the floor, any ground-bound predator could have easily nipped the scepter.

  Max had admitted that he’d prepared the Lexan cover for lift-off. Someone else might have observed his operation and planned to take advantage of it.

  Had the scenario gone as planned, the crushed body of Max Kinsella, aka Mask Guy, would have joined everyone else on the killing floor.

  But the plan had gone wrong, thanks to the hypersensitive sixth sense and super-physical strength of said Max Kinsella.

  Temple paused to smile. Even when she was mad at him, she knew he was a hero. Her secret smile faded. It was hard to be a hero’s helpmate, was all.

  And . . . there was something Max wasn’t telling her, as usual. He had gone very vague when she’d asked what had kept the leopards from plunging to cat heaven sixty feet below.

  He’d had nothing to do with it. Couldn’t have.

  And what the heck had happened to Hyacinth anyway? After she’d left the wide-load tracks in Max’s back? Shouldn’t she have been DOA on the floor far below, along with her mistress?

  Nobody had asked Temple to ID a cat.

  Not even her own.

  Hmmm.

  Since she didn’t think interrogating Midnight Louie, wherever he was, would do her one whit of good, she decided to start with the wandering Russians.

  Madame Olga was to be found wandering the lower levels of the installation, a study in melancholy. The exhibition was roped off now, of course, but it was not the scene of the death and insiders were still allowed access.

  “Such a pity,” Madame Olga said when she saw Temple catching up to her. “Such glory. All fallen.”

  Temple eyed the fittings from the Czars’s private apartments; exotic woods inlaid with mother-of-pearl and green-veined malachite and capped with gleaming gold ormolu decorations.

  “So exquisite,” Madame Olga murmured. “Hard to believe that anyone lived like that. Our Swan Lake tutus were real swans’ down. Genuine diamonds studded our tiaras. Our strained muscles and bleeding toes were our own, however. We last dancers of the Old Regime. Oh, not myself, Miss Barr. I was too young for that. But the tradition lingered on. Even today, I am watched. Not that they can stop me. Even though I defected twenty years ago, and it is now legal, old habits are stubborn and they fear bad press. They fear an ancient o
f days and dance like myself. Mighty Mother Russia, who feared no one, not even Napoleon! Now my home is a bankrupt republic and its rulers are the Russian Mob, not the liberated mob of the people. Bullies will always be bullies, only some will be refined.”

  “Is wrong ever refined?”

  Madame Olga finally glanced at Temple. “Perhaps not. So. My brother, poor wounded swan, is dead. He was poetry in Swan Lake once. Now I could not knit a missing wing for him to fly one short distance with.”

  Temple instantly recognized the fairy tale of the maiden indentured to weave wings for her seven brothers before they were turned into . . . what? The proletariat?

  “Someone,” Temple said, “wanted you to help steal the scepter for your brother’s sake.”

  “Ah. A young woman with imagination.” Madame Olga lowered her imperial receding chin to focus on Temple’s face instead of the glittering artifacts surrounding them. “And a knowledge of folk tales. Yet you look so . . . Paris Hilton. Perhaps it is just an American affectation of corrupted innocence.”

  Temple cursed her bleached blond locks for the eighth time. Goldilocks was not a useful role model for modern women. Nor was Scarlett.

  “It’s the look of someone who wants an answer,” she said. “There was more to your brother’s fall from grace than you let on.”

  The old woman pinched the top of her Roman nose as if clearing her brain of blood. Strong nose, weak chin. Always a deceptive physiognomy in a woman. Temple tended to believe the nose, not the chin. Some of the feistiest breeds of lapdogs and the boldest belly dancers were zilch in the chin department. The recessive chin, in fact, was a snare and delusion for men who needed to think they were in charge. Her own was neither leading nor retreating, but just right, like Baby Bear’s bed. Which was still a bear’s bailiwick and very dangerous to be caught sleeping in.

  Hmmm, speaking about being caught sleeping in . . .

  Madame Olga laughed. “You have not lived in a totalitarian state, ma petite. Your face is a mirror of your emotions. I read guilt and it will cloud your judgment.”

  “You called me ‘ma petite.’ ”

  “Are you not petite?”

  “Did you live in France for a time?”

  “Mais oui. We all did. We Imperial Russian entertainers spurned, our artistry despised by the New Order. We fled to France, always a haven for the artistically disenfranchised. Your Negro musicians, for instance, and dancers. Josephine Baker, the divine Afrique. Erté, the gay blade of Art Deco designers. My poor brother took a pseudonym from him.”

  “ ‘Art Deckle,’ a play on the Art Deco style. I always think of the paper when I hear the name. Deckle edged.”

  “Yes. He was a man of culture at the beginning, anyway, which may be why he used white-face for a disguise that night. Then he was a man of any way he could make a living. Being an exile does that.”

  “And you?”

  “I suppose women have it better. We can always settle for decorative. I became a dressmaker’s model for a time. Everyone sketched me. I was quite famous for a mystery woman.”

  “Still, that must have been a fabulous time.”

  Olga leaned her Roman nose hard against a Plexiglas barrier, staring at a mannequin wearing a Russian court dress with a glittering white train as long as a snail’s trail at dawn.

  “My brother’s body was broken, I was impoverished and forgotten. Our history was . . . considered trivial and decadent. We went our ways. His were secret and demeaning. I was eventually . . . rediscovered. Asked to teach master classes in Paris, London, New York City. I never saw him again until I came to this”—she sighed, looked around the vast museum-within-a-hotel-casino space—“this proletarian paradise. What hath Lenin wrought? Las Vegas. Anyone can win. Or lose. A people’s paradise.”

  “Someone won possession of the Czar Alexander scepter,” Temple heard herself saying. Hypocrite!

  Temple felt horribly guilty for playing dumb, but she still needed to determine whether the earlier death was part of a separate plot. Damn Max for putting her in this position! For the first time, she understood Molina’s fury at being sure he was guilty of something and being unable to touch him. And now Max had really become a thief. Was it possible he had killed Andrei? The idea was unthinkable, but Max had been doing a lot of the unthinkable lately. No wonder Temple herself was contemplating the formerly unthinkable.

  “Not I,” Olga said in her measured way. “And certainly not poor dead Andrei.”

  “Were you working together to get it, though?”

  “No. Never working together. Not again. Not dancing together. Not for decades. Working apart to the last.”

  She eyed Temple askance through her crepe-paper eyelids, so like an aged serpent’s.

  “Someone had enlisted him for this cursed venture. I discovered his participation too late. He never dropped me. Not once. When we danced. Until here. And he did not drop me here either. I dropped him, I suppose. It is the perfect pitiable end to Swan Lake that a ballerina should be the cause of her supporting prince’s fall. Brother, lover, it does not matter. Do not cause any man’s fall, my petite interrogator. It is not something one ever lives down.”

  When, Where,

  Why For?

  Temple fled from the nihilism of Madame Olga to the urbane charms of Count Volpe, even though he reminded her of some rapacious object of Molière’s wit.

  He was always ready to oblige a young woman, an attractive young woman, as he told her freely.

  “Are there any unattractive young women in your opinion?” Temple asked.

  “Not really,” he said, after a moment’s consideration. “Why are you worrying yourself white about these exhibition-area deaths? It was obvious that someone would attempt to steal the scepter and someone did. Quite dramatically. Pity about the acrobat. I don’t believe the thief intended to drop her, although that fact did slow down the pursuit.”

  Volpe’s urbane Old World sexism and New World frankness almost undid Temple. She supposed if she had seen an old political order perish she might be somewhat cynical too.

  “I’ve just come from identifying the body.”

  “My dear girl! Pardon my blasé pose. It’s expected of me. Here. Sit down. Why would the police impose on you for this sad duty?”

  “I’m the only one around at the moment who’d seen Shangri-La out of her concealing makeup.”

  “Surely the tiger-faced fellow—?” He waved a veined but exquisitely fluid hand.

  “The Cloaked Conjuror had never seen her face-to-face.”

  “How bizarre, when you think of it. Two strangers performing life-threatening antics on wires and cords. It did lend itself to substitution, didn’t it? Is it certain that the Cloaked Conjuror we saw before the fall was indeed him?”

  “He was by the time the police got there.” Temple sat up straighter. “But it may not always have been him, is that what you’re saying?”

  Volpe shrugged and produced a dark European cigarette. “If you permit. Nasty habit, but so is being the eyewitness to a violent death. Who’s to say that was the mantled mage himself we saw caught in that cat’s cradle of rope? This theft was a piece of legerdemain gone astray, I think. The man in the catsuit appeared to be improvising, but he did apparently make off with the prize.” Volpe exhaled an elegant stream of blue smoke, scented slightly of licorice. “And why are you so involved, petite chou? Dragging you out to see a dead body! So retrograde. I thought they had television screens for that now.”

  Was Volpe probing?

  “They do,” Temple said. “But since no one else on the premises had glimpsed her face, I was elected to go to the viewing chamber. A room with a glass viewing window,” she added in answer to his elegantly inquiring eyebrows, which reminded her of something. Someone?

  “I wish I had seen her! She was an amazing performer, sinewy as one of the big cats yet delicate. Do the police have any idea who her almost rescuer was? He does appeal, doesn’t he, to the dramatic sense? Part rogue, part
rescuer, anonymous. That sort of swashbuckling type went out with the old-time movie stars, didn’t it? Fairbanks. Flynn. The Scarlet Pimpernel in literature. Zorro. Irresistible to women.”

  “I imagine that would be hard to live with.”

  “Who said anything about living with? I meant loving with. Young women today are so distressingly practical.”

  Temple felt her lightly freckled skin flush. Why did she think she could domesticate the wild Max anyway, or even want to?

  “I see his attractions are not lost on you. A fine hero for an opera—no, too ponderous. A ballet. He certainly had the moves up there. I almost thought he’d save her; I’m afraid he did too. It’s a remarkable thief who interrupts a clever caper to save the innocent bystanders. Or to try to. I hope the scepter is worth it to him.”

  “I do too,” Temple muttered fervently. She fidgeted under Volpe’s keen dark eyes, then struck back.

  “I think he was hired help.”

  “Really? Not a dashing entrepreneur, then, but some coarse theft-for-hire thug?”

  She wouldn’t let Volpe yank her chain any more. Time to turn the tables. If he was so blasé but observant, he might know something she could use. He had confessed a weakness for young attractive women, after all, and Temple could attract when she felt like it.

  She smiled and nodded. “You’ve said exactly what I was wondering. The scepter isn’t just some valuable artifact, it’s a one-of-a-kind catch. Whoever wanted it doesn’t need to sell it, or even show it off. It’s a trophy. Who’d want it for that?”

  “I would.”

  “You, Count, the toast of Vanity Fair’s photo layouts?”

  “Theoretically, of course. I am a penniless aristocrat, I’m afraid, and could not even hire a pickpocket. I might, however, be tempted to by the Russian government’s current scrabbling for money and recognition over the graves of my ancestors. Of its crawling like what you call a Johnny-come-lately to exploit the culture and glory that was Russia before the anarchists and Bolsheviks and drunken peasant party functionaries ravished its heritage and weakened its influence in the world.”